


re-runs and fugue states

by strangelyconflicted



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark Harry Hart, Henchman POV, M/M, Slow Burn, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2016-06-04
Packaged: 2018-06-10 05:40:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6942073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangelyconflicted/pseuds/strangelyconflicted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Feeling quite harassed despite entering the room to have a good time, Rashida prepared to deliver her usual rant when she saw that Galahad was staring at Harry like he was the last nugget in a 20-piece McNugget box. </p><p>Harry answered her unasked question: “I haven’t the foggiest."</p><p>Galahad, whom Lancelot patted on the back as she made her way to the king, looked more heartbroken than a man in a thousand-pound suit had any right to at Harry’s reply.</p><p>“You really don’t remember anythin’,” he mumbled.</p><p>(Or: How Harry Hart and Galahad Got Their Groove Back, from a henchperson's perspective)<br/>(Pre-The Golden Circle)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Redux

This was the fourth secret base the young, blond man had dismantled in twenty-two months.

Rashida would say this was impressive, but the number of dead co-workers that tended to accumulate whenever he showed up cowed her into keeping her thoughts private.

It was depressing how she could predict the downfall of an evil mastermind once he appeared.

He was not the first British secret agent she'd ever seen. Eleven years in minioning had seen a parade of square-jawed men of varying ages walk her through puberty and her first rented car by saving the world.

She supposes that she should feel some sort of gratitude towards them. Her continued existence despite their efforts to mow down every company she'd been a part of never left her wanting for contracts.

But the young man was special, Rashida could tell. For one, he didn't quip like he was a fucking movie star, like that black-haired toff who melted her then-employer’s ice hotel with their own sun laser before she could retrieve her luggage. He was closer to the blond hulk who emerged from the sea in Bahamas like a damn porn star; all rough hands, scars, and affected elegance, like being fancy was a cover.

Only, she was sure, the Bahaman porn star never shouted, "You're a fuckin' prick an' a half, Merlin," to his handler.

Rashida rolled behind a pillar the young man would miss with his lighter, which she correctly deduced was a grenade of sorts, to listen to his one-sided banter. 

His type of chatter was, she learnt, the kind that ignored mortar blasts and naval railguns. It was all, "feed J.B." this and "take him for a walk" that.

If it wasn't for her time henchpersoning for a creepy general whose plans to overthrow a Mexican government was foiled by the Bahamian porn star, it would’ve sounded like some kinky sex stuff. 

At least, she was sure “J.B.” was a chubby pug who stayed with a female relation or two.

Any villain worth their salt would've used this to track down the young man's home base and crush him. But years of employment under moneyed evil taught her not to hope that they would learn such subtleties.

She stored this information instead, as a reference and a bit of amusement. Being a gun-for-hire left her with little time for normal hobbies.

"Lancelot's still in Siberia?" the young man said and shrugged a literal coat of squashed bullets off his bespoke suit. He tilted his head a little, considered the now-empty corridors around him, and added as he ran off to one end, "Only, the little one wants our dogs to have a date this Sunday and she's supposed to take them while I'm in Argentina."

He pauses at the end of the corridor to put his hands on his hips and pout at his reflection on the steel beam beside him. "J.B. needs exercise. Galahad out."

Rashida kicked her legs out, popping her knees back into place. The knee thing should get checked out, but with her resignation came a more important bit of information: the kid had a name, a code name to be sure, but at least she could stop mentally calling him "The Chav-sounding Bloke in the Bespoke Suit".

She watched the base- who the fuck builds a villainous lair in Camberley- turn into rubble minutes later, on a bike she parked by a tree near the base. Rashida turned to pedal away from the scene but a flash of red made her look back at the rubble.

Above rubble, she saw the red plane of her employer and a Cessna circle around each other. Their mounted guns ripped through the relative silence of the countryside and lit up the sky. Below them, the same black cab Galahad drove out of a secret base two months ago dodged trucks and grenades. She was sure the other paramilitary outfit her employer hired were the only henchpeople left there.

Her employer was a red-haired woman who thought that everything should be dyed in the color of blood, sometimes, with actual blood. She actually threatened to bleed Galahad dry before the agent used his taser ring to escape.

The mere fact that she was still alive and trying to kill Galahad in a blood red plane gave Rashida hope that maybe, just maybe, she would have a repeat employer-

Rashida sighed as the red plane dropped from the sky and the Cessna dropped low to fetch Galahad. She rubbed her face and pedaled away as the cab’s wheels retracted into its body to reveal four jet engines.

Maybe Galahad was more like the ice hotel-melting prick than she thought.

***

From Rashida’s experience, there were three types of villains on this earth.

One was the type who poured their resources into multibillion shell companies to enact a mad plan of world domination. The other types were just insane or politicians.

Rashida weaned herself off the latter two after a coup overthrew her employer off his twenty-year dictatorship. Something about children waving his entrails around reminded her too much of the town she grew up in. Evil masterminds paid better anyway, and on time. Sometimes, they even had medical, dental, and housing plans that rivalled civilian ones.

Exceptions to this duality pleased her, though by pleased she meant 'terrified and intrigued'. Her company’s newest acquisition, a dashing man of a particular age, was such an exception. His bespoke suit was the standard for most civilised persons-of-evil, as was the deep, starburst scar that topped his milky left eye. It was the lethal dignity that emanated in waves from him that granted him the distinction.

He, Harry Hart, was Not To Be Fucked With, and she could respect that and have ten kilometres between him and her jugular to spare.

"Thank you for allowing me to join your organisation at such short notice," Harry told Rashida's boss Jeffries, who was smitten with him. "I couldn’t resist Salticidae's offer after hearing of its success."

"Ninety-six point twelve percent success rate, sir," Jeffries replied. Galahad's interruption dropped the number, and it bothered her boss more than he let on. Then again, Jeffries had been uncharacteristically irritable since their contract with the red-haired villainess.

Harry waved his hand and said, "What matters is your performance and conduct. I look forward to working with the talented women and men of this company" before walking away, hooking eyes on his form with every stride of his elongated legs.

Rashida's perception of the man was justified two hours later, in a pub of a small town near Dusseldorf. When they left Harry in the quaint locale that morning, it had been full of hard-working folk. When she was asked to check in on him hours later, the pub was still full of people. They were just hell of a lot more dead and sporting knives of various sizes in their throats.

She found Harry drinking by himself in the midst of it all, smiling as he surveyed the carnage around him. When she reached him, he offered her an unopened bottle of craft beer and an explanation "I'm afraid one of the locals let slip their distaste for my proclivities. It's a happy coincidence that they're all members of the rogue unit we were hired to eliminate.”

Harry dusted off his shoulders and held out his elbow. "I read your profile. It's not far off from the typical profile of an Mi6 agent. It shows in the number of skirmishes you've survived."

Rashida shrugged and linked arms with the older man.

“I myself fit the profile as I am now, though I admit that I have a rather sizeable chunk missing from my history. Ah,” Harry stopped her as she was about to step on a puddle of blood. “Blood and grit are rather difficult to remove from leather without scuffing the finish. Do be careful.”

Running away seemed like a good idea but turning her back on Harry was a dangerous enterprise.

Her decision to escort the gentleman out of the Murder Pub was something she celebrated later. The extra zero, courtesy of Harry, was appreciated, even though his note was not:

"I let slip to Jeffries that your manners were impeccable. Bring your knives with you next time. Dusseldorf’s made me confident in challenging you for Salticidae’s record for kills with knives.”

***

In-between Galahad’s unconscious uncoupling of her contract with smugglers in Belém and Harry's affairs in Madagascar, Rashida learns the following:

\- Galahad is the butt-monkey of his outfit (and the youngest of the lot);

\- Harry is as efficient in killing with a regular brolly as he is with a gun or any pointed object;

\- Churches make Galahad squirm, like they’ve done him a great offense;

\- Harry Hart was probably a fucking super spy before he joined, if his gadgets were anything to go by;

\- His own codename irritates Galahad during stressful situations; and:

\- Brunch made by Harry Hart is delicious, even when surrounded by viscera.

***

Oranges in this Valencian market is as numerous as the clumps of blood and dirt still on Rashida's boots. She gave up on the debris after Harry's soap tip didn't work. She settled for staring at the navelinas in display while spreading jam on some toast. Since Salticidae was on the beck and call of a deranged oil tycoon, she wouldn't be able to finish what she bought.

She was so preoccupied that the sudden appearance of an orange in front of her startled the jam from her knife.

"Sorry for the surprise, love." Rashida looked at the hand attached to the orange and traced it back to the man who held it forward. She was proud of herself for not flinching or running away at the sight of Galahad's moss green eyes.

She took the orange instead of apologising for the bullet she had to lodge in his trousers back in Qatar. The agent smiled and asked for permission to sit, to which she complied with. 

Prosthetics concealed most of her face and cosmetics took care of the rest. It was inconceivable for the agent to recognize her, though guilt ate at her for playing around on recon.

"Thought I'd give you a taste. It would've been rude otherwise." Galahad grinned. 

Rashida refrained from rebuking the young man for making such a banal comment. She'd thought he was better than the insufferable spies she grew up with, and hearing the flirtation was quite a blow.

She opened her mouth to make him go away when she caught something moving in her periphery. She glanced at the source of the movement and saw enough to make her shoulders sag with relief. The agent had not lost his touch after all; he was blending in with the crowd to escape the henchmen stalking him.

She giggled and blinked coquettishly at Galahad. The men pursuing the agent was from the agency that fucked up Salticidae’s game plan for Camberley. She might as well help the agent, who was a rubbish flirt. She’d have to parrot his lines to Harry, the king of rubbish lines, later.

When they passed, Galahad asked for her number and excused himself. Rashida could only give him an approximation of a longing stare while she worked to keep her laughter at bay.

They meet again later that day in the more familiar setting of a hostile battleground. The agency pursuing him earlier had found their way to the warehouse of the legitimate export company currently employing Salticidae and with them came Galahad.

She settled in a perch above the gunfight after evacuating the civilians. Galahad mowed a swath through lanes of his enemies, which luckily only had a few of Rashida’s squadmates, with little compunction for style. It was unusual for the excitable young man, who relished showing off his flexibility and athleticism like he wasn’t gambling with his life with each exaggerated movement.

Rashida studied his movements and saw that he only moved on the left side of the warehouse. She tuned her radio to the frequency of the unit assigned on the abandoned quarter of the warehouse. The muffled cracklings of a woman swearing near the radio confirmed her suspicions that Galahad was a distraction- for Salticidae or for the agency, she didn’t know.

She was about to call on reinforcements when she heard the woman say, “Merlin needs more time to take this data and persuade Salticidae to back off. And don’t pretend that you don’t like showing off, Galahad.”

“Lancelot, a gentleman does not ‘show-off’.” Rashida caught Galahad pausing mid-kick to make air quotes. That explained who Lancelot was, at least.

A sharp scream made her redial her radio to one of the Salticidae mercenaries fighting below.

“Rashida, doll, might want to use that rifle of yours to get rid of the bloke kicking my kidney in.” When Rashida shot the offending man, her squadmate hummed his approval and said, “Jeffries sent word to pull out, but there are five of us left in this mess. Think you could get us out?”

With one last glance at Galahad, Rashida sighted in the scope of her rifle and went to work. One by one, she picked out a path for her squad, thanking the stale air as she switched between targets. The steel beam she perched on was high enough to hide her from onlookers. The harsh fluorescent lamps swinging from the beams concealed her from those who attempted to look for her.

“Might wanna get down from there, doll,” her squadmate told her as he slipped out of the warehouse. “Dicky passed by a C4 charge primed near the supply closet. Dunno if there are others. Party’s over anyway.”

She looked down and saw a pile of inert bodies where Galahad had been entertaining himself. A quick adjustment on her radio tuned her to the offices once more, though seconds passed before she heard a soft, but heartfelt, “Fuck you.”

“Language, Galahad.” The woman from earlier was still there, presumably carrying orders from Merlin.

“Lancelooooooooot.” The agent’s prolonged whinging was the last noise Rashida heard from the room as she made her escape. 

She had taken the grate off the window when she saw a red plane taxiing towards the warehouse. It was the same color and make as the Camberley woman’s plane, though it was impossible for it to be the same thing. 

Yet it was clearly there, bloody, metallic, and about to crush her body into the warehouse.

“Merlin said there’s a plane coming our way,” Rashida heard Galahad shout into his radio as her own teammates said, “Might wanna jump off the warehouse now!”

Rashida leapt off the warehouse window and landed on the ground in a roll before running pell-mell to her bike, nestled beside the warehouse wall and some crates.

“If we get a bonus, I’m buying you a motorcycle,” said Rashida’s teammate as she pedalled away from the warehouse. Unfortunately for her, the flurry of metal, wood, and unsent packages swept her in their wake.

The same teammate in who offered the motorcycle carried her off to HQ after a cardboard box hit her on the head. He told her that a Cessna carred away the same black cab they saw in Camberley while the red plane sputtered out of the scene.

She didn’t know what disturbed her more: the fact that her former employer was still alive after two fatal plane crashes, or that Galahad was seen dangling out of the black cab.

***

There was, once again, blood in the cracks of Rashida’s boots. A bit of brain was stuck to her hair as well. Opposite her, Harry “let’s be discreet” Hart was immaculately put-together despite instigating the bloodbath that led to her ruined boots.

It was of no consequence, but the contrast was worthy of resentment. She only held her tongue out of respect for the man’s wristwatch, which seemed capable of incapacitating attackers as well as inducing amnesia on unwary victims.

“There’s no need to lean away from me when I use my watch,” Harry reproached her as he shot one last dart into a sleeping John’s neck. “They only affect the intended target.”

When asked where the bloody hell the watch came from, he only answered, “It was on my wrist when I woke up from my coma.”

That itself merited questions. Was Harry a mild-mannered, vanilla-white middle-aged man in his old life? Was he an assassin whose memories were swept away to make him a ruthless killing machine?

First? Unlikely. Second? Most probably.

In-between repositioning the senator of Oklahoma to imply axe murderer-slash-auto-erotic asphyxiation enthusiast and scrubbing fingerprints off weaponised Pringles cans, Rashida asked Harry how he managed to refill his gadgets, -

\- “Pure enthusiasm for the art.”-

\- where his home base was,-

\- “Here and there.”-

\- and why they were framing the senator of Oklahoma for mass murder and auto-erotic asphyxiation while inside the National Mall-

\- “There are men for whom death is too sweet for.”

Only one exchange gave Rashida insight into who might pre-amnesia Harry be.

“Oxfords not brogues,” Harry answered an inane query as he heaved the final corpse in the Reflecting Pool. “Words to live by, Eggsy. Words to live by.”

Rashida didn’t even need to ask what the hell an Eggsy was, as Harry continued, “I’m not quite sure what an Eggsy is either. Regardless, that advice will serve you well unless you’re tracking a mark in the wet.”

Whoever an Eggsy was, it was unfortunate enough to have earned a nickname comparable to breakfast foods and an acquaintanceship with Harry Hart. 

As Harry only extolled the virtues of snobby clothing with people he deemed worthy of banter, she concluded that this person with a protein-based sobriquet had been closer than an acquaintance. Since Harry remembered the hunger-inducing nickname instead of the person’s actual name, she inferred that it was either the person’s preferred name or the way Harry’s lizard brain chose to remember them.

Ultimately, Rashida told him as she and Harry climbed a tree to avoid a roaming security guard’s trembling flashlight, the name didn’t give her enough to go on. As much as she wanted to believe that no sane person would take a name like Eggsy, globe-trotting informed her that people had names like Bheyby, Ningning, Dingdong, and Tsutsay on their birth certificates.

The only other thing Harry could associate to the name was a pair of green-blue eyes, which could belong to anyone at this point. The jogger who put the security guard to sleep, for one, had a green eye in one socket and a blue one in the other.

“This man is not supposed to be here,” Harry tapped in Morse on Rashida’s hand.

The jogger pre-empted her reply by shooting at their tree with an incendiary round.

While her fall from the rapidly-burning tree concluded in a tuck-and-roll, Harry’s trajectory took him in a somersault that ended with the blade embedded in his shoe cutting off the jogger’s hand. Callouts would’ve been dispensed, had the jogger’s friends stayed behind the trees and the Washington Monument. A hail of bullets from the jogger’s back-up chastised the besuited gentleman instead, annoying Rashida as danger only made him more insufferable.

His recklessness was reminiscent of Galahad, who also thrived in life or death situations. When faced with improbabilities, both men became fluid, their movements honed for the easiest way to mow down their foes. They were dancers rather than the skilled murderers they were, each move choreographed in the split-second pauses afforded by their reflexes.

Rashida told Harry her of the comparison as they cut through the exercising folks of D.C..

The comparison piqued Harry’s curiosity. It was a relief to finally talk about Galahad to someone else, but having a pompous fifty-something almost stop her to enquire after the agent in the middle of emptying a magazine into a host of enemies was not the way she wanted her curiosity reciprocated.

“Idle banter is more ideal while fighting,” Harry agreed as they dodged the remnants of their attackers to dive inside the Lincoln Memorial. “But you cannot fault me for my curiosity. This Galahad sounds rather fictional.”

Her reply, a rude comment about his age and senility, came ten minutes later, after Harry dispatched their pursuers with an eerily-familiar exploding lighter.

“Then let me assess that agent of yours myself,” Harry replied, because he was a child beneath all that proper English affectation.

Rashida was about to reply when she heard the hum of a helicopter approaching them. She and Harry ran and ducked behind Abraham Lincoln, still miraculously whole except for a few bulletholes, to watch a grey helicopter swerve around the Washington Monument to land on the Reflecting Pool.

Harry’s earpiece crackled to life. The middle-aged man raised his brows at whatever he heard and said, “The helicopter belongs to our next client. It seems Jeffries was fetched from our headquarters.”

He lead Rashida away from the statue to the helicopter when the mercenary leader stepped out with a petite woman in a plaid suit. Even from a distance, the woman looked like she made grown people cry as a child and snapped the necks of taller people as an adult.

The impression lasted as they stopped in front of her, even when her pleasant smile momentarily gave way to confusion as her eyes swept over Harry.

“This is Agent Lancelot,” Jeffries said, unknowingly explaining the woman’s air of lethal competency. “Her organization requested our assistance for an operation in Northern Tarawa.”

Harry stepped forward and held out a hand. “It would be our honor to assist you, Agent Lancelot.”

Lancelot took Harry’s hand and shook it. She definitely recognized Harry from somewhere. Though her movements were languid, the way she stared at his scar spoke familiarity.

“We look forward to working with Salticidae, Mr.- ?” Lancelot said, trailing off with a quirk of her mouth.

“Hart, Harry Hart.” If Rashida wasn’t so fascinated with the way Lancelot’s eyes widened at his name, she would’ve kicked Harry for his cheek.

If any of the signs Lancelot displayed bothered the gentleman, he didn’t show it as they spoke of the details with her on the flight back to HQ.

There were times when the agent would pause and tap on the side of her glasses. When Harry offered to fix whatever them, the agent opted to pull her lenses off and hook it on her jacket pocket. Her surreptitious efforts to keep it facing the middle-aged man made it obvious that she was definitely broadcasting Harry's face somewhere.

“Or you need more sleep and perhaps learn how to trust others,” Harry said when Rashida shared her suspicion minutes after Agent Lancelot left them on HQ's helicopter.

“He has a point,” Jeffries agreed.

Rashida flipped both of them off.

“Quite.” Harry smirked. He nodded at her and Jeffries before he headed inside.

Rashida retracted the middle finger aimed at Jeffries when he told her to keep an eye on Lancelot after Harry's retreat.

“I noticed the way she eyed Hart and it wasn’t in the ‘I want you to choke me while you fuck me into the ground’ way I was doing,” Jeffries told her, weakening Rashida in a way a bullet to the gut would. 

He huffed and added, “Oh hush. Get ready. We have a gentleman assassin to babysit and a couple of tailored posh twats to recover vases with in two days.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, this was a struggle to write. Mind you, I've written this and a couple of others around the latter half of 2015, but they've rotted in my GDocs since then, unfinished. Woe betides the lazy arsetit.


	2. Adumbration

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Familiar faces return, misunderstandings ensue, and names are revealed (some are even refuted).

The young agent who Harry was very insistent on meeting apparently had a name other than Galahad. 

"For God's sake, Eggsy- put down the vases and follow her!" growled Merlin from the agent’s phone, put on loudspeaker after he misplaced his glasses.

And that revelation almost gave Rashida a heart attack.

"Shame on you, Merlin,” Galahad- Eggsy, apparently, in real, non-espionage life- scolded. “These are the Melrose Abbey pots you Scots have have been missing.”

“I know- I gave you the mission. Rashida will handle them while you go after the woman who shot you, who is on her way to a helicopter. You would have known this if you were more careful with your glasses.” 

Kingsman’s tech officer sounded like Rashida when Harry’s done a particularly pratty thing, like shining his fucking Oxfords seconds after setting an entire cave full of terrorists on fire.

Yet overpowering her feelings of camaraderie was her desire to find and shake the Scot and force him to tell her that Eggsy was a spur-of-the-moment endearment and not Galahad’s actual name. She had a feeling that if he did not confirm this, her life would get flipped-turned upside down; it was not a prospect she wanted to come to life.

“The trucks arrived ahead of schedule and I had no other choice!” Galahad grumbled as he put the vase he held back into its crate.

The trucks, Rashida informed Merlin, indeed arrived ahead of schedule. The trucks which, according to Kingsman intelligence, should contain kilos of meth to be bartered for the vases and not the seemingly-immortal redheaded woman from Camberley who shot at them at sight.

“Quite. ETA of target to chopper in T-minus fifty seconds. Galahad, head for the chopper hovering by the eastern clearing. Rashida, pack the vases, stay behind Galahad and rendezvous with Delta at point.” 

The agent put his phone on Bluetooth and ran out of the hut as soon as Merlin finished. Harry urged her to follow Galahad through the glasses Kingsman lent him. He, Jeffries, and Lancelot formed Delta, the team that kept the Camberley woman’s reinforcements and the hapless goons she tricked at bay.

Rashida thought about abandoning Galahad as she packed up the vases in a crate and loaded it onto a trolley. That was the smarter thing to do, for obvious reasons. From all the summaries Harry gave of classic stories such as Nikita and Pretty Woman, women only get into deep shit if they followed sleek men in suits- the Centre for Nikita and Richard Gere for Julia Roberts. 

But she wasn’t in that kind of movie and she wants to know if Eggsy was just a flub, if she was just hearing things, if people actually gave their children or their mates protein-based sobriquets more freely than she thought.

She was glad that she needn’t follow Galahad in secret. Following the agent without getting spotted, much less with cargo, would have been a masterclass in stealth. 

Watching the agent slip through a room with a wall made of CCTV cameras and emerged on the other end to disarm a walking nuclear tank gave her enough proof for that.

Keeping a crate of fragile, ancient treasures away from people shooting at Galahad became a lot more difficult once they reached a clearing. Between a rifle-wielding madwoman boarding a helicopter equipped with heat-seeking armaments and the posh but lethal wanker chatting her ear off, all Rashida could do was hide behind an undamaged tree and occasionally peek out to pick off unwary henchpeople.

She was nearly clipped in the shoulder by the undying Camberley woman when Harry suddenly spoke into her ear: "I'm afraid I’ve let Lancelot leave me in a precarious situation to help Jeffries to safety.” 

Before she could run off, crate-first, Galahad managed to jump on the heads of dying henchpersons and latch onto the Camberley woman’s fleeing helicopter.

“Leave the pots, they’re fakes!” Galahad shouted as he swung a leg over the helicopter’s landing skids, “Find Jeffries, he’s the real target!”

Alarmed, Rashida quickly pushed away from the trolley and sprint out of the village. The large empty spaces between the village and their getaway flatbed proved unexpectedly tricky due to the dozens of old French mines that were definitely not there when she and Galahad entered the village.

The new ornaments did not surprise Harry, whose voice had a wet quality only achievable with a mouthful of blood.

"Not a punctured lung," he told her after she navigated the bloody minefield and found him slumped against their Camaro. "Kalashnikov made me bite my tongue."

She made it clear that she believed him almost as much as she believed in David Cameron being innocent of swine post-mortem swine abuse.

"Eton boys are not to be trusted," Harry sniffed.

Rashida had barely shoved him into the convertible when she had to shunt him off before an RPG-7 flayed them alive.

“From their uniforms, I believe they’re the same outfit who rudely interrupted our stroll in the National Mall,” Harry told her once she regained control of her limbs and hauled the gentleman to a standing position. “It seems they are the same outfit who ruined your operations in Camberley. Perhaps they still serve your employer?”

Truly, that was rude. She respected her red-haired, one-time employer and thought Jeffries was decent enough to merit no grudges. It felt like betrayal, whatever that meant in the world of paid security.

Rashida agreed to Kiribati to make herself feel that she was as high-functioning as a person could in their line of work, not to feel as if she had a knife in her back.

Fifteen minutes away from Taborio, Rashida had an actual knife in her back. The only thing that consoled her was that Harry’s stab wounds were peppered around his abdomen and ruined the white of his £500 shirt with his blood.

“Did you know that ‘last-ditch effort’ used to mean the last efforts of a dying army?” Harry told her casually and really, if he wasn’t so damn good with his gun, she would take her chances and trip him up for their foes to finish off.

Instead of leaving him to die, Rashida did the responsible thing by dragging the gentleman onto a wheelbarrow from a nearby shed and arranging him in a way that allowed him to shoot as she wheeled them both to safety. She left a wad of $100 notes underneath a tin can in the shed, hoping it was enough for a new wheelbarrow and a new house in general. 

Why and how did Kingsman not know that the Camberley woman was behind the deception? Why had the Camberley woman even hired Jeffries if she planned to kill him in the end? And why in the fuck-tarnation-hell did the Camberley woman’s henchpeople still litter the dirt roads?

Galahad- she refused to call him Eggsy- was already hanging off the side in a helicopter somewhere above the sea. All these henchpersons were supposed to go after the agent, or at least clean up after their employer. Why change the routine now?

“Ashie? Harry?” Jeffries’ whisper from the glasses could barely be heard above the gunfire and the screams of Rashida’s calves. “In case you’re wondering, Lancelot’s carried me off like a giddy princess back to the speedboat.”

“That makes the two of us,” Harry replied while reloading his handgun.

Jeffries’ giggling answer nearly made the vein on Rashida’s temple burst.

“Don’t be so rude, my maiden heart can’t take it,” Jeffries complained after Rashida put her vein’s feelings into words. “And we’ll catch up later, Lancelot says I’m a sitting duck for the snipers trying to kill me.”

“Consider this, Rashida: This wasn’t a complete wash,” Harry, ever the gentleman, said, “You’ve managed to prove the existence of Galahad.”

He then gave a critique of the agent's fighting technique- brash, instinctive, too flashy- without a sense of irony until, quite serendipitously, the chopper Galahad forcibly boarded swerved drunkenly in the sky above them. 

The aforementioned agent was still dangling from one side of the chopper. His appearance gave Harry pause, giving Rashida enough time to look around the ravaged countryside for a vehicle. She cut off what promised to be an amusing quip from Harry by scooping him out of his wheelbarrow and shoving him onto the back of a pick-up truck that had more holes than paint.

Harry stayed blessedly silent as she pulled on wires to start the truck. A glance at the rearview mirror showed that the break in commentary was caused by Harry following Galahad's movements like an ineffectual adder. Instead of entertaining her curiosity, Rashida swerved down the road towards Bairiki.

The questions, along with concern disguised with hostility, spilled out once they were in sight of the pier and Harry's Galahad-watching almost ended with him getting brained on the railings of the truck.

"You've spectated worse without expiring," Harry answered, addressing her concerns and avoiding her questioning completely.

Needling only produced silence and swerving to jag the gentleman's view of the spy resulted in Rashida's ear ringing from a warning shot aimed close to her head.

She bodily hauled the near-bloodless toff in the pick-up in retaliation once they reached the small port.

Tossing his gun away and carrying him in a way that obscured his view of Galahad was pettiness repaid with a cruel remark on the spots on her face.

An exchange of sentiments about their age and skin was nipped in the bud by a familiar voice.

“Ashie!” Jeffries shouted as he popped his head out of their speeboat at the end of one pier. His tone completely changed along with his posture, now resembling a soggy mermaid splat on the pointy end of the boat, when he saw Harry.

“Mr. Hart. How do you do?” he said, accent slurred in what he thought was a seductive manner.

Rashida saw that her expression was mirrored on Roxy’s incredibly offended and sleazed-out face.

Before either woman could vocalize their disdain, an explosion overhead destroyed their attempts at syllabicating. As debris rained down on them, they busied themselves with spotting a golden-haired secret agent among human chunks and blackened metal falling to the sea.

"There," Harry half-shouted, bending away from Rashida's back to look at the sky.

Harry consented to being carried like a child by Rashida to look at Galahad slowly descending with an atrocious pink and bile-coloured parachute. Rashida was too busy willing the agent's chute to drop him in the more sanitary parts of the lagoon to comment on the color combination. If Harry's face was anything to go by, she would have to scoop Galahad out of the water and she'd rather not swim in spotty water.

Fortunately for her, Galahad managed to land on a hunk of metal that used to be most of the helicopter.

“Merlin, the helicopter’s destroyed. Jeffries is secure and the pots are still at Taborio,” Lancelot said as she looked at Galahad with her glasses. “Galahad’s mostly uninjured. A broken rib, two black eyes, broken toes and feet. Add a heart there if this goes as well as I think it will. You can land now.”

Rashida could see Merlin’s Cessna approaching them from the direction they came from.

"Let me down," Harry commanded imperiously at Rashida as Jeffries and Lancelot climbed out of the boat to hail Merlin and Galahad.

Rashida had half a mind to drop him into the water when she remembered the hundred and twenty-four ways he could kill her four feet below ground in sparkling blue sewage water.

Galahad by now had discarded the colourful abomination that was his parachute and was nattering into an unseen earwig. Miraculously, his suit survived the explosion with nary a rip but for bullletholes, scorch marks, and wrinkles from the arm he used to wave at Lancelot

The fraying material around the bulletholes made Rashida blink. She’d seen the same spray of fabric on another besuited gentleman before. It was, in fact, the gentleman who addressed her with the same name Galahad’s handler used on the agent.

Normally, these coincidences would cause her to: A) Throw Harry off the pier, haul Jeffries over her shoulders, shoot the Kingsman agents and escape; or B) Push Harry and Jeffries into their boat, kidnap Galahad- Lancelot was far too capable to be captured- and find a nice spot in Tekarakan to interrogate the agent.

Option A and B both sounded disagreeable, Rashida thought as the Cessna sprouted pontoons to land beside the pier, but today’s escapades convinced her that her short life would be infinitely shorter if Salticidae continued relations with Kingsman.

“What are you doing?” Harry asked as she legged it to their boat. It was by sheer luck that she didn’t trip while running sideways to obscure Harry from Galahad, who had turn to gawk at the peculiar woman running sideways on a pier with a full-grown man draped across her shoulders.

With the power of hindsight, Rashida would later describe what followed as a coup de foudre.

There was no other way to describe it. Harry slipped to the pier on his feet to take a look at Galahad, who looked as if the Rapture came and formed a new world in the time it took for their eyes to meet. The look Harry gave him was childlike in comparison, full of awe in spite of incomprehension.

Watching them felt voyeuristic. Harry, who guarded his authenticity jealously, couldn't quite get his face to attempt indifference. Galahad, always irreverently professional, appeared like how a raw wound felt: pained, vulnerable, exposed.

Rashida silently stepped backwards until her heel hit the gangplank. This, she realised, was Option C. Leaving the two men locked in their staring contest until the end of eternity was an unexpected outcome she wholeheartedly welcomed.

Her foot made it to the last notch of the gangplank before everything went tits up.

“Galahad! Stand down!” Merlin shouted as he leapt out of the Cessna- which apparently could park itself- and landed on the pier ten feet below- which apparently was a thing tech wizards could do.

Rashida managed to dive backwards into the boat just as a hail of bullets flew at her from Galahad's direction.

“Eggsy, no!” Lancelot shouted as she tried to push Jeffries back to the boat.

“Stop shooting at Rashida!” Jeffries shouted as he ducked under Lancelot’s arms. 

He ran after Harry, who took a running leap from the pier to land on the junk where Galahad stood. Or at least, Jeffries tried to jump after Harry, as Merlin disabled him a precisely-shot dart to his neck from his watch, and really, how many fucking middle-aged men had dart-shooting watches?

“They sent those fucking pictures! Those fucking threats to Harry!” Galahad said as he stopped to reload his gun. Before he could continue shooting, Harry blocked his view and said, “I volunteered to join Salticidae.”

“Harry no, they-”

“Salticidae didn’t send those messages, the red-haired woman you blew up did,” Merlin said as Lancelot heaved Jeffries across her shoulders. “Her only known name is Scarlet. Valentine adopted her, Gazelle, and a third orphan who wished for anonymity when they came of age nearly two decades ago.”

Galahad’s bafflement was second only to Harry’s. Rashida gave up at Merlin’s mention of the Camberley woman’s name and moved on to helping Lancelot position Jeffries.

“She took Harry from a hospital in Kentucky when she found out that we stopped Valentine’s plans. The messages were there to bait us into traps. As for Jeffries, I suspect she believes he betrayed her in Camberley; Salticidae retreated when you dismantled her base.”

If Harry was shaken by Merlin’s information, he didn’t show it. Galahad glanced at him and asked, “How did Harry escape her and why is he with Salticidae?”

“We don’t know yet, Eggsy,” Lancelot said. For once, she exuded uncertainty instead of confidence.

Rashida rubbed her eyes. She did not lack emotional intelligence; contrary to tropes, a lack of empathy isn’t a trait found in living henchpeople. But everything Merlin and Lancelot seemingly kept from Galahad spelt unprofitable trouble.

Harry nodded at Rashida’s call and leapt back to the pier as if it weren’t a man-sized gap. 

“Harry!” Galahad followed the gentleman with ease and Rashida wondered, not for the first time in an hour, if she had died and was living out a coma-induced dream.

It was then that a helicopter- a fucking blood-red helicopter, emerged from the trees and barreled towards the pier. Before she dove out of the way, Rashida saw Harry and Lancelot run for the boat as Merlin and Galahad sprinted for the Cessna.

If she weren’t about to dive into rank water, she would throw her boots at them and shout something about trying to look cooler than they actually were.

When Harry pulled her out of the water minutes later, the pier had been completely destroyed. Lancelot was on the back of the speedboat, the rifle Rashida stashed under the seats set on the back of an unconscious Jeffries. Above them, the Cessna swerved around to avoid the gunfire from the helicopter, which bore Scarlet on its skids.

Or what was left of Scarlet. Chunks of her red hair had been torn from her head and so were chunks of skin around her exposed body. Instead of gore, Rashida saw metal and wiring beneath the flayed skin, with the exception of ash-white and pink bone exposed on the ridge of Scarlet’s jaw.

That explained her apparent immortality, at least. But no one paid mind to the fact that the woman who caused them grief for the past year- and in the case of Galahad, nearly three years- was half a fucking Terminator. They were, mundanely enough, trying to keep alive.

Unlike their previous encounters, Kingsman and Salticidae alike were forced to flee the firefight. Scarlet’s goons began streaming into the lagoon and chased them out as soon as they tried to fire back. Speedboat and Cessna split up and communications were temporarily shut down.

Lancelot circled around the island twice to mislead their pursuers. Once they were free, she headed for Buariki and got rid of the speedboat.

Thankfully, the locals were less concerned with their mismatched group as they were with the fuss south of the capital. Ensconced in an abandoned home, Rashida learned through Lancelot that Merlin and Galahad crashed the Cessna and silently made their way to Koinawa.

“I’m to rendezvous with them in Fiji in two days,” Lancelot told Rashida apologetically when she begged him to stay. Jeffries woke up swearing murder on Scarlet and left ahead to hitch a ride in a cargo plane; Harry was equally useless. 

Instead of popping out of the existentialist hole he threw himself into after hearing that his past was forcibly taken from him by the adoptive daughter of the man who nearly-killed him, Harry shed his suit and took a swim in the fecal-less water nearby.

Intense pointing at Harry’s discarded suit and the clothes left by Jeffries crumbled Lancelot’s resolve. 

“I’ll speak with Merlin,” she promised as she changed her own clothes. “He won’t object to Salticidae joining our next operation, especially now that we’ve confirmed Harry’s status.”

Rashida almost cheered the concession when Lancelot added, “If you’re able, we’ll meet you, Harry, and Jeffries in Tonga. We’ve been tasked to protect their king. It’s a long story but we’ve evidence that he’ll be targeted by Scarlet next.”

The sympathetic pat Lancelot gave Rashida before leaving felt like poor compensation for the horseshit they were about to mire themselves in again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize if you've waited for the update. Life's been... really not fit for extra-curricular activities. 
> 
> Going forward, I'll post the next update date on my profile.
> 
> This fic hasn't been Brit-picked or beta'd, so I welcome any and all comments.
> 
> Thanks for reading this far.


End file.
